Most companies only publish medical research findings on blockbuster drugs once both are true:

1. Production has started

2. A patent has been filed

The reason for this is that they want to maximize the amount of production time under patent b/c that maximizes revenue.

If you are the researcher, that means you have to wait until all of the production setup is ready to go.

Merck took a different stance.

There, the patent was filed as soon as the researcher was ready to publish. This meant that there was less time under patent for production but was much better for the researcher as they got their findings out earlier.

The thinking was that being able to publish earlier would attract better researchers and in turn would lead to better drugs, more revenue, more profits.

This was in the late 1990s so not sure how this plan worked out as I haven't been in pharma since that era.

Would be interesting to hear from other folks more knowledgeable.

I need a bit more depth and detail to believe that this doesn't destroy the pharma industry.

What would the empirical evidence even look like? It's not like the modern pharma industry existed before patents.

The complicating factor is that as time passes our ability to reverse engineer has grown, however I'm not sure that invalidates the need for patents, the question is whether the new patents are being assessed well from a novelty / inventiveness perspective

-[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law

at the time patents were debated, a key part of the proposal was to encourage the transfer "trade secret knowledge" to the public good while still protecting the inventor. this is not an "encourage innovation" argument, it's to stop knowledge from dying with a secretive inventor, knowledge such as glass or metallurgical techniques, formulas, etc.

the inventor also benefited from this patent protection because they could expand their business unlimited by maintaining a small inner circle who knew the secret.

I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case:

If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.

Patents have been mostly a pride checkbox for me, but at the same time being able to get credit for something you could never build is interesting. I’m less supportive of the loose monopoly part though, that seems to be the real issue dampening innovation

Everyone hates patent trolls (non practicing entities who dont implement the idea themselves), but practically its an extremely high burden. I did some patents on financial market plumbing, implementing that requires licensing and infrastructure far beyond any coding or building problem

Thinking of it 10 years before investment banks get around to it I think should still be incentivized someway

But the current system is cooked

That doesn't follow at all. A baby doesn't have accountability, but has benefits.

I'm all for accountability being required for important descion making. I too wouldn't let babies make similar descisions.

This non sequitur just makes it sound like you're throwing around talking points and getting them mixed up.

The idea that an AI could have some sort of property rights is a nonstarter, legally speaking. It's just as invalid of a legal idea as claiming that a tree could have a patent on the shape of its leaf.

So when people go to the patent office and say "I didn't make this! an AI invented this", the obvious response from the patent office is "cool, well only humans get rights, and if you didn't make it, you can't get a patent on it, so too bad". This isn't a judgement of AI.

Now, a lot of people come to presume that this means that anything that AI touches is not subject to any IP rights -- but that's not what this means at all. Humans are allowed to use tools to create things that they have IP rights to. Your typewriter itself can't hold a copyright to a book, but if you use a typewriter, you can still hold the copyright to the book.

Ultimately, whether or not the use of AI is disqualifying to a human inventor doesn't really have anything to do with AI -- it all hinges on whether or not the human meets the requirements of holding the patent.

I believe in many countries, the standard for a wide range of IP is that if something is largely produced by AI systems, it can not be patented / copyrighted / trademarked. It seems that "a significant" contribution must have been done by humans, that's the word you'll see again and again.

But I am not sure how one could prove that something is produced mostly by AI, or mostly by human. Right now anyone could use AI models to do most of the work, and just say or make up documentation that it is (major) human work.

implies that if he provided his name as the inventor, the application may not have been rejected.

No, in the US AI output is ineligible for copyright not because "art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts", but because only human created works are eligible for protection.

>only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Formally speaking, it's not the case, though this is commonly misunderstood. Statistical models are definitionally ampliative, otherwise they wouldn't be statistical. One can argue about it until they're blue in the face, but it almost always comes down to a misunderstanding of what the models are, what the mathematics behind them is a description of, and what the underlying logical structures represent.

The thing is that the position and objection to these models isn't actually a substantial, reasoned position where the words have a direct meaning. Though it's dressed up like reason, it's not the point. It's a kind of metaphor. This actually does reflect the nature of intellectual property law. The legal framework is knowingly illogical at an object-level, because the end its seeking is completely divorced from the means. It has to be, because the idea of intellectual property is absolutely unjustifiable in-and-of-itself. It's just a useful legal fiction to make sure people are getting paid by commoditizing ideation. That's not a bad thing, it just means you have to be mindful that bottom-up reason will lead you astray when dealing with it.

But, since the income of a patent office is determined by how many patents they approve, one can dream ...

The law does not recognize the anthropomorphization of inanimate objects.